THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2013 37
month, fifteen people were arrested. "Like
shooting fish in a barrel," Findley noted.
One November morning, around 4 A.M.,
they swooped in on Kenny McGlothlin
while he was inspecting a Griffin bin be-
hind a Popeye's. "We kind of got you by
your nuts this morning, don't we?" Fel-
chak observed. He said that they might
take McGlothlin downtown and book
him, or they might not. "Depends on what
you tell us."
McGlothlin wavered at first, but,
under duress, he agreed to testify that
Henley knew he was buying stolen loads.
Several other independent haulers, facing
possible jail time, also coöperated, and the
charges against them were dropped.
In an attempt to secure a grand-jury
indictment, Findley met with an assis-
tant D.A., Larry Standley---a meeting
that he later called a "complete disaster."
The D.A., whom Findley described as
"rude, uninterested, and belligerent,"
blamed Griffin's problem on the compa-
ny's own lax security, and dismissed the
testimony of the thieves. "Who's going to
believe them?" he said. An attorney sug-
gested to Findley and Bob Griffin that a
civil suit, under RICO statutes, might be
easier. "Hearsay is usually accepted,"
Findley wrote, "and you must only show
'a preponderance of the evidence,' not
'beyond a reasonable doubt.' " In Decem-
ber, 1991, Griffin Industries filed suit
against Henley and a dozen independent
haulers, accusing them of taking part in
an organized grease-theft ring.
But during the early legal proceedings
Griffin's strongest witness, David Rice,
was nowhere to be found. Findley finally
tracked him down in West Virginia,
where he was serving a nine-month jail
sentence for negligent homicide; he had
killed a man in a car accident and then
fled. Findley also learned that Rice had
been living under an assumed identity; his
real name was David Himes. Jaworski saw
an advantage. In the depositions, he ques-
tioned Griffin's tactics: coöperating with a
felon, wringing testimony from haulers,
and dispensing money to key witnesses.
For weeks, Griffin had paid for Himes's
motel room and living expenses, and
promised him a hundred dollars for every
arrest that resulted from his phone work.
Himes testified that he was given twelve
hundred dollars to help pay for a leg oper-
ation, and that, during his time in jail,
Findley visited him and put money in his
account at the canteen. Upon his release,
Himes was given regular work at Griffin.
"Do you know why they did any of
those things for you?" Jaworski asked
Himes in a deposition. "Was it because
they wanted you to testify against Everett
Henley?"
"Objection!" Griffin's lawyer said.
"Calls for speculation."
Jaworski insists that he could have
won the case, given the chance. But de-
fending a RICO charge against a wealthy
corporation would have cost Henley and
his co-defendants ninety thousand dol-
lars, Jaworski estimates. "I told him, 'You
can fight it and spend your life savings on
me---which I would appreciate.' " In-
stead, Henley chose not to contest the
lawsuit. Griffin was awarded a default
judgment of almost $1.9 million for lost
grease, damaged equipment, and legal
fees. Jaworski describes the suit as an act
of corporate aggression. Findley argues
that Griffin was merely protecting itself.
"Anyone who intimates that Griffin In-
dustries set out to put independents out
of business is a bald-faced liar," he said.
Henley declared bankruptcy, which
temporarily allowed him to avoid pay-
ment. Though he continued running
his grease service, the judgment gave
Griffin the rights to any profits---and
Henley, who was determined not to
give up a penny, was forced to put what-
ever he made back into the business.
After two years, JoAnn says, "we couldn't
do it anymore." In 1996, they closed the
plant and moved to the countryside
north of the city. There they ran a small
farm, launched a wrecker business, and
raised the kids.
When Stuewe took over Dar Pro as
C.E.O., in 2003, the company was
doing everything it could to extract added
profit from its rendered fat and bonemeal.
"We tried making particleboard, land-
scaping timbers---we tried everything, and
nothing really works," he told me. Al-
though biofuel from used cooking oil was
clearly the frontier, it was a seemingly lim-
ited one. "It doesn't work real well as road
fuel," Stuewe said. The glycerine in bio-
diesel leaves glasslike deposits in engines,
and it freezes. Dar Pro enlisted the tech-
nology arm of Honeywell to fix the prob-
lem, using a method called hydrocrack-
ing---essentially knocking a carbon atom
off of each molecule of the oil---to pro-
duce a fuel that is identical to petroleum
yet burns far cleaner. But the process is ex-
pensive and complex, requiring high tem-
peratures and intense pressure. So Stuewe
approached Valero Energy Corporation,
an oil refiner based in San Antonio, to
manufacture the fuel. In June, the two
companies opened the Diamond Green
Diesel plant, in Norco, Louisiana, which
will produce a hundred and thirty-seven
million gallons of renewable diesel a year.
To operate at capacity, Stuewe said, it will
need to capture "up to fifty per cent of all
the used cooking oil in the country."
The biofuel boom has injected into
the trade a degree of money and profes-
sionalism that was unthinkable in what
Jaworski calls "the Wild West days." Ja-
worski has lately been getting calls from
as far away as Australia from people with
chemistry degrees trying to figure out
how to get into the biofuel business. One
of the new entrepreneurs was Jason Bur-
roughs, a thirty-nine-year-old former
skate punk who had helped build a mul-
timillion-dollar data-storage company.
He told me that he had had an epiphany
on the day after the September 11th at-
tacks---the same day he picked up his
Dodge Viper. "It was awkward," he says,
"because pretty quickly we learned why
these terrorist attacks were happening---
the connection with oil and all that. Here
I am driving around this nine-mile-per-
gallon car." Burroughs sold his Viper and
bought a Prius, and in 2005 launched a
cooking-oil-collection venture, Diesel-
Green Fuels. If the business fell through,
Burroughs said, he could just get a pickup
truck and go out collecting. "It's such easy
money," he told me.
The changes in the business have
only sharpened Dar Pro's desire to stop
theft. During my visit to Total Compli-
ance Associates, the security company,
in May, GraBois outlined the firm's
plan. "What we're trying to do is cut off
the head of the ultimate recipient," he
said, referring to the smaller renderers
and biofuel companies who buy stolen
grease. "Once we put these people out
of business and there's no place to sell
it, the gypsies"---his term for street-
level thieves---"will go on to a differ-
ent crime." It was the same strategy
that Griffin employed twenty years ago
against Henley. Indeed, GraBois de-
scribed to me a classic reverse sting---
or started to. "We've set up undercover